Cons

Packing for a week-long trade show like CES can be an arduous task â€“ especially if you're headed to Las Vegas. Putting aside the boxes of Alkaseltzer and â€œâ€How to Win at Pokerâ€ books, the most important piece of kit needed at shows like this is a comfortable and sturdy backpack that can easily accommodate a variety of items at once, including a laptop, camcorder, digital camera and poker winnings. Style is obviously a bonus but comfort and durability are the primary concerns. So how did Dicotaâ€™s Take.Sport backpack perform on our tech conference road trip?
The backpack itself looks stylish enough, if a little on the bulky side. Our sample model came in plain black with some red thread trim sewn-in here and there. Stylistically there are no flourishes to immediately set the Take.Sport apart from rival backpacks, but what it does give you is a feeling of superior build quality.

When the Take.Off Sport first arrived, the accompanying tags confused us. The first tag reads, â€œStylish backpack for Notebooks up to 15.4in.â€ Fair enough, we thought, if a little small considering the size of the bag. Then we spotted a red star on the tag (it was a rather large tag), which read â€œfor Apple MacBook Pro up to 17in.â€ Hmm, interesting. We then spotted another red sticker saying rather cryptically â€œup to 15.6in â€“ 16.4in.â€ The limits of its storage skills are not exactly crystal clear then. We decided to test it out and the compartment did indeed fit a 17in MacBook Pro as well as any number of smaller laptops. While it may have accommodated the laptops, how well it protected them is more important.
Unloaded the bag weighs only 0.85kg, it measures 34.5 x 46.5 x 12.5 cm, and offers with six separate compartments. The first of these is right at the front of the bag and is a slim and tidy pocket with a single zip across the top. So small is this compartment that, with the zip hidden under a flap, you may forget it is even there. Returning from Vegas we found a card reader we presumed was left back in the UK prior to our trip, despite searching the bag several times.